Save a Blogger From Begging...Buy Stuff

The one, the only

Sister Site

Second week of school, as he's done early every semester since he started college, Ken Mannion delivered letters to his professors from the school's office of disability services outlining the accommodations he's entitled to.

It's not much.

Extra time to complete homework assignments, if he needs it. (So far he hasn't, and he's had to do a lot of writing for most of his courses. ). Extra time for tests and exams. (That he takes advantage of. He gets nervous to the point of mental paralysis sometimes.). Separate, quiet testing areas, usually in the disabilities offices. (He's easily distracted, especially when he's nervous.). Repeated instructions. Written instructions when possible. None of his professors has ever balked at any of these requests.

But the letters don't explain why Ken needs these accommodations. They don't inform the professors that Ken has been diagnosed with ADD, OCD, a math learning disability, and Asperger's or that he takes medication for the first two and for anxiety. This is policy to protect students’ privacy. It’s really not the professors’ business why, all they have to know is that they have to make the accommodations. But even though his professors have made the accommodations Ken needs, most willingly and cheerfully, after a couple made it clear they didn’t like having to do it and acted as if they were doing him a favor they weren’t sure he deserved, we decided it's best they have things explained to them right at the start. We being Ken, the blonde and I, and his counselor. So when he delivers the letters, Ken makes appointments to sit down and talk to each professor about what's going on with him and how it might affect his behavior and performance in their classes.

Having ADD, he explains, doesn’t mean he won’t or can’t pay attention. He pays very close attention, until he can’t. His powers of attention are unpredictable and a source of frustration for him. Sometimes, trying to sort through a piling up of information, his attention will focus on the wrong thing. More often his attention will just flag at some point. His brain will get tired and simply shut down. So he’ll miss some things, usually that last little bit said at the end there, which is usually when new instructions and assignments and changes in the syllabus are announced.

Having OCD doesn’t mean he’ll go around straightening all the pictures on the classroom walls or spend excessive time lining up the pens and pencils on his desk. It means that sometimes he just can’t let a subject or an idea go. Sometimes he has to rehash and rehash a thought. Sometimes he can’t make himself finish answering a question or writing an essay. There always seems more to add. Attacks of perfectionism not only get in the way of his completing assignments, they can get in the way of his starting them.

And being on the spectrum, having Asperger’s, doesn’t mean he’s autistic, never mind the stupid and politically motivated revisions in the DMS 5. It doesn’t make him a character on The Big Bang Theory or Sherlock Holmes. It makes him…well, him.

What it comes down to is that Ken gives his professors a dual lesson in certain disabilities and in the difference between a disability and the person with the disability. He teaches them things they might not have known about ADD, OCD, and Asperger’s, but mainly he teaches them what it is like to be Ken Mannion trying to be a good student in their classes. There’s a companion lesson here, that I hope his professors have been sharp enough to pick up on: Every person with a disability is themselves. A disability doesn’t define you. You and the disability work out an arrangement. And with help, understanding, and some accommodations, you can get the better of the deal.

This makes Ken, in his own modest way, a disabilities advocate. It’s unlikely these days---I should say, not as likely as it once was---he’ll encounter professors who need to be educated about what disabilities like his are in the abstract. What he’s teaching his professors is that it’s not enough to know the textbook definitions. No matter how well-intentioned and sympathetic they might be, they still have to recognize and get past their own preconceptions, prejudices, and expectations and deal with the individual student in order to deal with the disabilities. This is the challenge, getting well-intentioned, sympathetic, smart people to recognize they have preconceptions and prejudices.

Twenty-three years after the signing of the Americans With Disabilities Act, you might think you wouldn’t need to worry about this. A generation has grown up with the ADA. But a single generation isn’t enough to wash bad ideas out of a culture. Many people still think of people with disabilities as dis-abled, which is to say, unable, incompetent, helpless, confined not just to but by their wheelchairs, walled in by their blindness, stymied by their deafness, locked in their heads by their autism, broken in some unfixable way, and doomed---cursed even---to lead lesser lives, pitiable, pitiful, lonely, and apart.

Steve Kuusisto, poet, memoirist, blogger, professor, disabilities advocate, and blind guy since birth who since birth has been told over and over again, in one way or another, with varying degrees of sympathy and, often, out and out hostility, “You can’t do that! You’re blind!” has a post up in which he retells a story from his memoir, Planet of the Blind, about a blind friend of his who went to buy a new TV:

The salesman wanted to sell him a cheap black and white job--insisting the sound would be the same but the unit would be cheaper. Dave pointed at the biggest color set in the place and said he’d take it. “But why?” the salesman pleaded. “Because,” said Dave, “blind people have families that like color.”

Probably that salesman thought he was doing Dave a favor and was quietly congratulating himself on his good deed. And probably he was embarrassed when Dave taught him a needed lesson. His sympathy was based on an assumption about blindness and, probably, disabilities in general, that they are isolating and that people who have a disability are lonely and forlorn, caged by their disability. It’s not in this story but the salesman was clearly assuming something else, that being blind means not being able to see anything. Many people who are blind watch TV because they can see enough to follow the action, if not pick out every detail. From this it follows---should follow, at any rate---that many blind people who can’t see well enough to do some things, drive a car, for instance, can see enough to do other things, like use a rifle to chase off a coyote poking around the barnyard, scare away a thug come to rob the store, even lead a duck on the wing.

If your reaction to that bit of news was WTF? you’re not alone. Steve’s post is a response to a generally liberal collective WTF---Rachel Maddow did a smug and snarky piece that basically equated letting blind people carry guns with letting suicide risks, meth dealers, and known sex offenders get gun permits----that is based on some of the same assumptions as the salesman trying to sell Dave a black and white portable TV had, that blindness is a total absence of vision and that blind people are isolates without friends or family or, as it happens, property, leisure time, hobbies, or a taste for fresh fowl.

No doubt a certain type of liberal’s nervousness about guns is at work here. Some of us just can’t get our heads around the idea that for many people guns are necessary tools or that for many others guns are no different than fly fishing rods or parasails, equipment for a sport you don’t let your children play with. And probably there’s some reflexive Not again-ing based on a Tea Party-inspired loosening of gun laws in several states that now allow guns in churches, guns on college campuses, guns in bars, and guns in your pocket whenever you feel like packing heat when running errands or taking a stroll.

But what’s also going on is a failure of imagination or, more accurately, an imagination influenced by old prejudices and assumptions these good liberals don’t even know they have. They’re imagining Ray Charles in The Blues Brothers or Mr Magoo not blind people with residual vision who own farms, run businesses, go out in the woods and the fields, who have friends and families and co-workers and employees.

They’re “seeing” the disability as a dis-abling. They’re seeing the people with the disability as defined by that disability. Well, no, not by the disability, but by these liberals’ preconceptions and prejudices about the disability.

They need an education.

They need to talk to Ken.

__________________________

At the Maddow Blog, Steve Benan doesn't understand how not being able to see well enough to drive a car or read the small type on application forms is not the same as not being able to see at all. He also seems to think that blind people who carry guns are more likely to start firing into crowds than sighted people. Also, the headline on his post "The blind arming the blind" is an obvious riff on the expression "the blind leading the blind" which uses blindness as a metaphor for foolishness and stupidity. Here it's not a metaphor. It's a flat out insult.

The Republicans will be happy to keep the government shut down until they feel that the Democratic voters, in their minds the only beneficiaries of federal spending, are sufficiently punished for the sin of being Them.

Always keep in mind, Republicans have themselves or at least have their most faithful voters convinced that all government spending that doesn’t buy bombs or bullets is a combination of theft and bribery (See Romney, Mitt. Gifts.) or a form of charity that is morally corrupting. Better to do without food, medical care, and heat in your home in winter, than to accept a government “handout” and show yourself up as a spiritual as well as material failure and risk becoming one of Them, the lazy and dependent Others.

Needing to believe that their suffering is their ticket to heaven, they’re willing to live with bad schools, crumbling roads, collapsing bridges, and sick and hungry children or, more usually, desperate to pretend not to know all the ways government not only makes their lives better but possible so that they can feel slighted, victimized, and virtuous.

Notice I’m saying the Republicans. Not the Tea Party. The establishment press corps continues to blame the crazies in the House when they’re not blaming the Democrats and the President for refusing to compromise, a word they like to use as shorthand for “surrender on every important point.” The assumption is still that the true grown-ups are the Republican “moderates” who will somehow find us a way out of this mess, if only the President will let himself be guided by them.

Where are these grown-ups and how many of them are there? There only needs to be seventeen who will vote with House Democrats to pass a clean CR without any nonsense about Obamacare or gratuitous insults to women and re-open the doors of government offices and lift the gates at the national parks and put nearly a million people back to work.

I don’t know much about Stebbins. At first glance he appears to be an ideal businessman, intelligent, socially responsible, a good corporate neighbor type, someone likely to see all the employees of his company as human beings and not just resources to be exploited and then disposed of when played out, the type of philanthropically-minded rich person who pack the halls at the Clinton Global Initiative looking to fund schools in Haiti and small business-enterprises in Africa.

At second glance, he appears to be a run of the mill oligarch whose concern about the debt is self-interested. If business leaders like him don’t step in, the debt might get settled by an increase in corporate taxes. He’s willing to accept nominal reform of the tax code in exchange for major cuts in entitlements, a “reasonable” position that makes sure the poor and the sick foot more of the bill than the rich and entitled.

“Look, I had the chairman of the Energy and Commerce committee, Fred Upton, tell me that he got into an argument with one of these young guys on his committee about the defunding of Affordable Care Act. Well the argument was 'look, Energy and Commerce had 50 hearings on that bill. Like it or not, it passed. The president signed it. The Supreme Court upheld it. So you don't get to pick a bill you don't like and link it to the entire financial well being of the United States.; Well the response is, 'I didn't come here to govern.' Well what did you come here for? What did you come here for? To burn it to the ground?”

Repeating myself here, but, yes, they did come to burn it to the ground.

The federal government is the enemy because it is run by the enemy---liberals---for the benefit of the enemy---Them! You know, those Others!

Their object isn’t to govern but to stop the enemy from governing, to take the controls away from those who are intent on doing the nation---“Us”---harm. They aren’t there to play politics. They aren’t politicians. No way. They’re taking control the way any decent person not a pilot would try to wrestle control of a plane away from the terrorists hijacking it. That idiot Congressman’s comparison between himself and his colleagues and the passengers aboard United 93 was adolescent and tasteless but not totally inapt. Smartypants liberals smugly pointing out that the plane crashed are missing the point. Crashing the plane saved the probable target, the White House, and God knows how many people who’d have been in the neighborhood that morning. The Tea Party nuts are willing to crash the plane to save the country.

(Of course, the comparison reveals itself to be ridiculous when you hear the nuts blustering that they don’t expect to pay any price for crashing the plane. They’re convinced the nation will cheer them as heroes without their having to be martyrs at the same time. Self-sacrifice isn’t part of their plan, only self-aggrandizement.)

But like I said there are only forty-nine Tea Partiers and the last time the House voted on a bill funding the government for at least a little while more, it included both the assault on Obamacare and women’s health and rights, and all but two Republicans voted for it.

The Republican Party is divided into three factions: The Religious Right, the Tea Party Right, and the Corporatist Right. There’s lots of crossover based on shared beliefs that they are the only true and truly deserving Americans, the real owners of the place, that there are privileges that come with ownership, and that there’s a great mob of Others, a Them, trying to take the country from them and deny them their privileges.

The corporatists just define Them a little more broadly.

By Them, the Religious Right and the Tea Party Right mean those who don’t look like “us”, who don’t talk like “us”, who don’t believe exactly what “we” believe. The corporatists mean everybody who isn’t rich, which includes most members of the Religious Right and the Tea Party Right who haven’t caught on that many of their fellow Republicans regard them as Them.

The corporatists believe the country exists for the care and feeding of millionaires and it belongs to those with the money to buy it up in pieces as they need it. You own only whatever pieces you’ve got the dough for. You’re entitled only to what you can pay for out of pocket. The corporatists hate Obamacare maybe more than Tea Party types. Exasperated liberals keep pointing out that Obamacare is based on a Republican design. They forget it violates the corporatist Republican principle that nobody gets to have what they don’t have the cash to buy and that includes good schools, safe neighborhoods, security in old age, and health care.

These are the people who read Atlas Shrugged as if it’s a Right Wing Wealth of Nations or Das Kapital. These are the Club For Growth types, the Gliberatians, the genuflecters at the shrine of Milton Friedman and kissers of Grover Norquist’s ring. They are the ones who insist that tax cuts pay for always and automatically pay for themselves, that the government doesn't create jobs, that regulating business and the financial industry is worse than counterproductive because the market regulates itself, that selfishness is the basis of all virtue, that greed is good. In the Washington Post interview, Stebbins laments the naiveté of the business community when it comes to understanding how Washington works but then he naively (I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt) buys into the Both Sides are to Blame nonsense the craven Media uses to absolve Republicans of blame and fault whenever they are to blame and at fault:

We have a higher duty of care to engage this issue. It is grossly reckless to watch the long term business trajectory of the U.S. to be at such risk. And we are part of the pathology that got us here. We've all had our K Street lobbyists who are part of the problem. You've got the classic narrative: Progressives say, 'fat cat CEOs want to throw grandma into the snow, and all their special tax interests.' And then you've got the Club for Growth that thinks we sold them out.

But the corporatists do want to throw grandma into the snow, some people’s grandmas at any rate, the grandmas who didn’t have the sense to get rich while the getting rich was good and who now rely on Social Security to keep roofs over their heads and Medicare to keep or make them well. The corporatists love Paul Ryan’s Survival of the Richest budget which, no matter how Ryan’s fans in the Media try to spin it, is a plan to eliminate Medicare and Social Security and just about every other social welfare program not in order to balance the budget but to reduce taxes on the rich to as near to zero as possible.

Republicans like Fred Upton can blame the Tea Party firebrands for the mess they’ve put us in, but if you vote with the firebrands you are as good as one of them, and while there are some Republicans who are voting with them because they’re afraid of them or of their influence on conservative voters back home, there are plenty who are voting with them because, although they deplore their manners, agree with their aims: cutting government spending to the bone, ending Obamacare, humiliating the President, and putting Them back in their place.

If and when the House passes a clean CR, it may be with the votes of a majority of Republicans, but it won’t be because they are all sane and sensible grown-ups doing the sane and sensible thing. It will be because the corporatists among them have been persuaded that shutting down the government will damage their re-election chances and hurt the bottom lines of their corporate paymasters.

The Tea Party hasn’t been getting its way despite the majority of House Republicans.

It’s been getting its way because their way is also the way of a majority of House Republicans.

And it’s not just in the House.

Remember.

The reason there will be a clean CR for those twenty sane, sensible, and brave House Republicans to vote for is that fifty-four Democratic and Independent Senators sent them back one.

“The majority of House Republicans already want to prevent a shutdown and a default. But there's a small group that insists on defunding Obamacare as an ultimatum, and they are not likely to be placated by a little government shutdown.”

How many analyses of what the Republicans are doing in the House have you read or heard that included assurances like the one above from the Atlantic’s Molly Ball that the majority of Republicans are sane, sensible, and willing to do the right and smart thing?

Look, if the majority was a majority and they voted to do the sane, sensible, right and smart thing, the supposedly sane, sensible, and smart Republicans would be joined by almost every Democrat and a clean CR with no mention of Obamacare and without another gratuitous assault on the rights and health of women would pass by something like 380 to 80 votes, and that “small group”, the Tea Party, would suffer a deserved and humiliating defeat.

But they haven’t voted to do the sane, sensible, right and smart thing. They didn’t do it last night. They don’t appear to be planning to do so next chance they get. So how is it they can be considered the majority?

Or to put it another way, how in God’s name are they any different from the Tea Party minority? How are they not the Tea Party?

The Republican Party isn’t this supposed majority. It is its supposed minority. It is a party of radical Right Wing reactionaries hellbent on destroying the federal government as a way of repealing not just Obamacare but the entire second half of the 20th Century and all of the 21st so far.

It is a party of middle-aged and old white men who’ve spent their entire adulthoods seething with resentment as their country has been “stolen” from them by blacks, by women, by gays, by liberals, by Them.

It is also a party of middle-aged and old white men and women who for the better part of thirty years have been coddled and flattered and bamboozled by their now former leaders and by the Media that’s coveted them as a market of suckers for their advertisers to exploit that they are the real Americans, they are jess folks, their perverted brand of Christianity is the true American religion, their hate-fueled, fear-driven, xenophobic, fetishistic tribalism is true patriotism, and their ignorance, anti-intellectualism, superstition, and reflexive rejection of anything like a fact that contradicts what they know to be true in their stony little hearts is good old American common sense.

This is a conservative country, they’ve been told over and over since the election of Ronald Reagan, despite polls that show it’s not really, and they’ve believed it, while the politicians and media shills doing the telling failed to notice that the word conservative doesn’t mean to these supposed conservatives what they think it means.

Smart enough that if we had a Republican President he’d be in line for a Supreme Court nomination.

Cruz was valedictorian of his high school class. He graduated cum laude from Princeton, magna cum laude from Harvard Law. He was a primary editor of the Law Review, executive editor of the the Harvard Law and Policy Journal. He was Solicitor General of Texas. He has argued and won cases before the Supreme Court. He knows how things work. He knows he can’t defund Obamacare even if he reads Dr Suess’ entire oeuvre on the Senate floor. He knows that even if the government shuts down now or later over raising the debt ceiling, the shutdown won’t last long. He knows that, even so, it will cause damage to the country and to Republicans’ Congressional chances in 2014.

He knows and he doesn’t care.

Because he knows this.

Come 2016, everybody will have forgotten.

Almost everybody.

Everybody but the Right Wing zealots who make up the Republican base and control the party.

They’ll remember that Ted Cruz was their hero of the moment.

This is what I think is going on with Ted Cruz.

Ted Cruz is ambitious and cynical as well as smart.

He was smart enough to see before other Republicans and the geniuses in the political press corps that the odds were against our having a Republican President come 2013 and are still against it for 2017.

Which means the odds are against there being a Supreme Court Justice Ted Cruz any time soon.

But he was smart enough to see something else.

He looked over the Republican bench, the people the media and the Party establishment have marked as potential nominees, the Jindals, the Rubios, the Ryans, Santorums, Walkers, Christies, and Rand Pauls and he saw that none of them are smart enough, reactionary enough, mean enough, angry enough, and hateful enough to rally the Right Wing faithful who will decide the early primaries and caucuses and so the nomination.

None of them are all that, but Ted Cruz could be.

If there wasn’t going to be a Republican President to name Ted Cruz to the Supreme Court, there might yet be a Republican President named Ted Cruz.

That’s why he ran for Senate.

And that’s what he’s been up to since he became a Senator, showing the Radical Right that he’s smart enough, reactionary enough, mean enough, angry enough, and hateful enough to be their guy.

I’m not predicting anything. I’m not even concerned with 2016. I’m describing what I see going on right now.

The faithful want the government shut down. They're looking forward to the pain and trouble it'll cause. They like the idea that failing to raise the debt ceiling will produce chaos and panic on Wall Street. They don't believe they'll suffer themselves because they don't think they benefit from either a functioning federal government or healthy financial markets. Even if they do suffer, they don't care. They'll bear their suffering proudly.

The white, middle-aged, middle-class yahoos who make up the Right Wing base have shown they enjoy cutting off their own noses to spite their faces. They already believe they’re being screwed. They’re right. They just refuse to admit who's doing the screwing. They prefer to blame Them. And they’re willing to take another screwing as long as They aren’t getting any more of “our” money. Besides, another screwing just confirms them in their own sense of victimhood.

They’ve got themselves convinced that all spending by the federal government is either a form of theft---a system for giving “our” money to Them---or moral depredation---bribes for votes. They don’t get a dime back on the taxes they pay and even if they did, by gum, they don’t want any of that dirty money. What do you think we are, charity cases, like Them? We can get along on our own just fine.

It’s accurate and possibly consoling to point out they’re crazy and stupid. They are driven crazy by anger, hatred, and fear. They are made stupid by the same forces because they’d rather feel their anger and their hate and their fear than think.

They don’t see it that way, of course. They see themselves as heroes in a righteous war to take their country back. The operative word is the possessive pronoun. This is their country. They own it outright. The land was theirs before they belonged to the land, to pervert Frost. And they want to hold on to all of it. They feel it being stolen from them just because they feel themselves having to share it. Over the last two generations they’ve been forced to share it with more and more outsiders, invaders, interlopers, and thieves. With African Americans. With women. With gays. With immigrants with brown skin who speak Spanish and languages that sound Arab to them.

They hate and resent all of them and are on a mission to punish Them.

Them has begun to include the young.

This, ladies and gentlemen of the press, is your Tea Party.

They are not likeable but misguided regular folks. They aren’t a picturesque collection of goofballs, crackpots, and eccentrics. They are not conservative. They aren’t representative of average Americans. They aren’t a potential audience to be wooed, flattered, and coddled in the hope they can be exploited by your advertisers.

They are a right wing, reactionary, regionalist, rage-filled and racist movement to “take back”, which is to say, take over the country and if they can’t take over they’re willing to burn it all down for the sheer spiteful pleasure of watching it burn. If they can’t have it all to themselves, then none of Them will have it either.

Washington establishment journalists like Politico’s Roger Simon can kid themselves that they aren’t the real Republicans, that the real Republicans are the well-mannered, well-tailored, well-educated lobbyists and staffers who buy them lunch and invite them to parties and help find their children jobs and assure them that the grown-ups are really still in charge and no one of consequence in the GOP believes what the Tea Partiers believe or wants what the Tea Partiers want and soon, soon, very soon, the grown-ups will show their hand and things will get back to “normal”. And of course this would happen sooner if only the Democrats would play along, if only the President would “compromise” some more, because, as always, it’s somehow the Democrats’ fault.

And the grown-ups in the GOP, the few who are left, probably tell themselves the same thing, that sometime soon the craziness will blow over and they’ll be running he show again.

There are probably Democrats who buy into this too.

And we all know that time and demographics are against them. The country is skewing browner and younger and more liberal.

The problem is that as the country as a whole skews browner and younger and more liberal, the parts of it where the Right Wing is in charge are skewing whiter and older and more reactionary and in those places the crazies are making the most of the power they hold and will continue to hold for possibly another generation and that means they will continue to send their angry, hateful, and fearful representatives to Washington; meanwhile, the other parts of the country will send fewer and fewer “sane” Republicans there.

The Democrats’ best hope for regaining the majority in the House isn’t to defeat the likes of Louie Gohmert. That won’t happen. What is likely to happen is that my Congressman, Chris Gibson, a moderately-inclined Republican (He voted against the food stamp cuts, for example.) will be looking for a new job come January 2015.

The Tea Party---the Radical Right---is for all intents and purposes and for the foreseeable future the Republican Party.

It’s looking to me there’s a consensus growing among the pundrity, left and right, that Ted Cruz made a fool of himself in one way or another this week, that he did himself harm by making the Party leadership mad at him, that he accidentally helped the President and the Democrats by admitting the Tea Party’s dearest cause, the repeal of Obamacare (which, by the way, is just another way of saying the humiliation of the President. One and the same to them) is a legislative impossibility as long as the Democrats control the Senate and a Democrat lives in the White House.

But the people who think Cruz is a fool aren’t voting in the Iowa Republican Caucuses. The Republican Party leadership is a gang of weaklings, quislings, bunglers, and clowns. And even if Cruz has somehow helped the Democrats and the President now, he has driven home the point to the faithful who will be voting in the Iowa Caucuses that what they’re voting to do is put a Republican in the White House who is one of them, a Republican who is as angry and mean and willfully destructive as they are but who is also as smart as a Democrat.

The Blind Guy, the Wheelchair Guy, the Cane Guy, the Guide Dog, and the Red-headed Film Blogger.

It was slow and painful going for me, the cane guy, somewhat treacherous going for Steve the blind guy, not all the easy for Nira, who’s still recovering from recent cancer surgery, and only possible going for Bill the wheelchair guy because of the network of ramps ascending the hills.

I don’t know the history of the ramps. I’d guess some sections or at least the pathways they’re laid on have been there since this part of the campus was built. Other sections and other ramps up to other buildings around the university are probably artifacts of the Americans With Disabilities Act. You’d like to think that institutes of higher learning like Syracuse, as the bastions of enlightenment and humanism they pride themselves on being, wouldn’t have needed an act of Congress to compel them to make simple accommodations for their disabled students, faculty, employees, and guests, but, in the days before the ADA, Bill was the first paraplegic Columbia admitted into its graduate program in anthropology and he and his friends had to build plywood ramps themselves so he could attend his classes, and Steve wound up suing the University of Iowa when he was working towards a doctorate in English Lit there because two of his professors refused to grant him extra time to complete the reading for required courses only they taught---their feeling was that it wasn’t their concern that a blind guy had had the nerve to try to do what only sighted people were capable of doing and it wasn’t up to them to do Steve any special favors if he couldn’t hack it.

As Steve routinely points out, before the ADA, it was taken for granted that all disabilities---handicaps---were permanent qualities of the individuals who had them instead of negotiable constructs relating to accidents of architecture, yet to be invented technologies---think about what life was like before glasses and hearing aids---yet to be discovered and developed medicines and medical procedures, and the prejudices and stubbornness of certain abled people like Steve’s professors.

(Steve has lately taken to using the term temporarily abled to remind the hale, whole, and hearty that all our bodies are fragile contraptions that will sooner or later break down or wear out, as I can attest. I like to think of myself as temporarily disabled, and I really do feel on the mend, but the fact is right now I am a guy with a cane who is grateful not to have to climb a lot of stairs to get to work and a year ago I was more nimble and spry and able than many people fifteen years younger than me.)

Which brings me to Rand Paul.

Last March, when Paul and his curly toupee took to the Senate floor to filibuster against John Brennan’s appointment to the directorship of the CIA because of the President’s use of drone warfare to kill terrorists (and Paul’s fantasy that life is a Tom Clancy novel in which good, God-fearing, loyal Americans who have made themselves nuisances to the Administration might see as their last sight on earth the reflection of a drone launched by the President’s evil minions in their silverware as they sit in sidewalk cafes in San Francisco), passels of anti-drone liberals took to the internet and the airwaves to encourage us to Stand With Rand, he was fighting the good fight on our behalf, and all I could think was, Are you out of your minds? What kind of liberal stands with the likes of Rand Paul? The only fight he’s fighting is the selfish, self-aggrandizing fight to get himself elected President in 2016 by playing to and inflaming the Right’s hatred and fear of this President and if he succeeds in that he will then fight the fight to enact his “libertarian” agenda, which is mostly a set of instructions for handing the country completely over to corporations and banks to run any way they think will make them even more money.

Rand Paul despises the Civil Rights Act and wishes it had never been passed because it presumes to tell businessmen like him they can’t choose their own customers according to skin color, ethnic background, or gender.

He would make the ADA go away too if he could for a similar reason, the government isn’t the boss of him and has no business telling him he has to make his business wheelchair accessible.

Rand Paul is an unabashed idealogogue who believes that straight white guys with money like him should be allowed to be selfish pricks if that’s what it takes to make more money and as far as he can see that is in fact what it takes.

The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. There’s no separating Rand Paul’s opposition to drones launched on the orders of a Democratic President from his opposition to that Democratic President on all things. There’s no standing with Rand without helping to advance his Presidential ambitions. Standing with Rand means kicking the legs, metaphorically and literally, out from under millions of Americans who are not straight, white, temporarily abled guys with money like Rand Paul.

Lucy Liu as Dr Joan Watson and Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes travel to London in the Season Two premiere of Elementary, tonight at 10 Eastern, 9 Central on CBS.

Like all true fans of Sherlock Holmes, I’m impatiently waiting for the return of Sherlock. Not happening for a few months yet.

Tonight, though, CBS’ Elementary begins its second season with Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu as Holmes and Watson and I’m looking forward to that. It’ll be a nice filler until the real updated Holmes and Watson, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, return.

You might remember I was less than enthusiastic about Elementary last season. I felt that its Holmes, while Miller looks exactly like my ideal Sherlock, wasn’t active and adventurous enough, and that the show’s writers had no idea what to do with Watson and were wasting Lucy Liu in the part. Both things changed in the last five or six episodes. Miller’s Holmes is still not the swashbuckler Cumberbatch’s is, but he’s gotten more dangerous and Liu’s Watson, while still too much of a junior detective to Holmes and not enough of the independent grown up the rea'l---that is Conan Doyle’s---Watson is or as simultaneously funny and deadly serious as Freeman’s Watson, has been given more to do and, more importantly, more to say that isn’t a string of self-help cliches and contemporary versions of “Oh, I say, Holmes, how the deuce did you deduce that one?”

At any rate, I’m liking the show more and more and I’m not just saying that because the great Wev McEwan has threatened to kick me in the shins if I don’t agree with her that it is the best TV show ever.

Tonight, Holmes and Watson go to London where they meet [possible spoiler redacted] who’s played by [possible spoiler redacted], a nifty piece of casting against type of which I heartily approve.

Below, are my two posts from February when I was just getting into the show and wishing it was more like what it’s subsequently grown to be. A third post, this one on not just Elementary’s but Sherlock’s, Robert Downey Jr’s, and Conan Doyle’s Irene Adler is in the works.

Also, I know. I’m leaving out somebody important. I’ll get to him later.

When I say Miller looks like Sherlock Holmes, I mean he looks like how I pictured my ideal Sherlock Holmes whose image my imagination pieced together out of Sidney Paget’s illustrations for Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, what I gleaned from the stories themselves, and my own wishful thinking about what I’d look like when I grew up: very tall, very lean, with a very high forehead, a very sharp nose, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and…young.

The last was important to my conception of Holmes and not just in helping me identify with him. Every Holmes I’d seen on TV when I was a kid---that would have included Rathbone, Cushing, and Stewart Granger, an undeservedly forgotten Holmes but to my mind then disqualifyingly white-haired---looked to me like an old man and I knew from the stories, where I encountered Holmes first, that he was in his twenties when he began his career as the world’s first and only private consulting detective and still only thirty-seven when he apparently went over Reichenbach Falls with Professor Moriarity.

But as much as he looks like Sherlock Holmes as I’ve always imagined him, he hasn’t convinced me he is Sherlock Holmes.

In fact, of all the Holmeses I’ve mentioned and the one I haven’t yet, he’s the least convincing Holmes. Downey is more like Holmes, even though his Holmes is something of a joke, the joke, being, however, the answer to the questions, What if Holmes and Watson were more like the sides of themselves that only occasionally show in Conan Doyle’s stories, usually in references to cases Watson hasn’t chronicled yet but from what little Watson tells us we can guess are much more adventurous, dangerous, violent, and outlandish than any of the stories on hand? What if instead of being the staid and proper Victorian gentlemen they’re usually portrayed as we get to see them as a pair of swashbuckling soldiers of fortune, not just the prototypes for a long line of movie and TV and mystery novel detectives but the precursors of James Bond?

That side of them is in the stories. Holmes can wield a sword, he’s a crack shot with a pistol, and he’s a master of martial arts. He has actually been a spy on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Even the part of the first Downey Holmes movie you might have thought was an outrageous invention by director Guy Ritchie, Holmes “relaxing” by taking part in a bare-knuckle prizefight, is inspired by a moment in The Sign of Four. Holmes, we find out, has been an amateur boxer and good enough that one of his old opponents, a professional named McMurdo still thinks Holmes missed his true calling when he left the ring to take up detective work.

“Very sorry, Mr. Thaddeus,” said the porter inexorably. “Folk may be friends o’ yours, and yet no friend o’ the master’s. He pays me well to do my duty, and my duty I’ll do. I don’t know none o’ your friends.”

“Oh, yes you do, McMurdo,” cried Sherlock Holmes genially. “I don’t think you can have forgotten me. Don’t you remember that amateur who fought three rounds with you at Alison’s rooms on the night of your benefit four years back?”

“Not Mr. Sherlock Holmes!” roared the prize-fighter. “God’s truth! how could I have mistook you? If instead o’ standin’ there so quiet you had just stepped up and given me that cross-hit of yours under the jaw, I’d ha’ known you without a question. Ah, you’re one that has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.”

“You see, Watson, if all else fails me, I have still one of the scientific professions open to me,” said Holmes, laughing. “Our friend won’t keep us out in the cold now, I am sure.”

I don’t think his name gets said in the movie, but according to IMDB, the boxer Downey’s Holmes defeats with a trick of a handkerchief is McMurdo.

Physical strength, athleticism, a capacity for violence even a relish for it, and a love of adventure and danger for their own sakes are intrinsic to Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Holmes. Holmes’ brother Mycroft spells it out for Watson and us in this exchange from A Scandal in Belgravia.

Jeremy Brett’s Holmes may not ever have aspired to be a pirate, but there’s a roguishness to him that suggests he’d be sympathetic to the pirate’s point of view and would have made a good one if he’d wanted. Brett was fifty-one when he took on the part---Cumberbatch was thirty-four when he started---and he knew better than to try to play Holmes young. But his Holmes is a man in his prime, still vigorous, and full of pent-up physical energy, which often shows most when he’s at his most still. It’s the stillness of a big cat, relaxed for the moment but always prepared to pounce. So it isn’t surprising that his Holmes can straighten out a bent fireplace iron, knock down a local bully in a bar, scale walls and climb drainpipes, and, as he does at the beginning of The Final Problem, take on and fight off three of Moriarty’s hired thugs in a scene that, with a little strategic slow-motion, could have come right out of Guy Ritchie’s movies, and it’s a scene that’s not entirely made up for television. At the beginning of the Doyle story, Holmes shows Watson the knuckles he bloodied punching a club-swinging goon in the mouth in the course of escaping a string of Moriarty-plotted attempts on his life that afternoon.

While we’re on the subject, Basil Rathbone---who made The Hound of the Baskervilles when he was forty-seven---couldn’t help inspiring images of swashbucklers and pirates, swordplay and feats of derring-do in his audience, since it was movies like The Adventures of Robin Hood and Captain Blood that made him a star. Of course, he played villains in both and in more than his fair share of other movies, but that was also an attractive feature of his Holmes. It added a sinister cast to his character. Which fits. As Doyle’s Holmes himself likes to point out, he’d have rivaled Moriarty as a master criminal if he’d turned his talents to crime, an idea Holmes seems to think is a recommendation.

But I’ve seen no pirate in Miller’s Holmes. No swashbuckler. I get no sense of any pent-up physicality. His Holmes vibrates but with a nervous energy that seems fueled more by caffeine and sugar than a sign of eager muscles demanding to be put to use. A 21st Century Londoner living in contemporary New York City, Miller’s Holmes is something of a hipster, which is fine. Doyle’s Holmes is a “bohemian,” and bohemians were sort of the hipsters of their day. But Miller’s Holmes looks to be in about the same physical shape and about as likely to spring into violent action as any average frequenter of Brooklyn coffee houses on a Sunday morning engrossed in the Times Style section and still a chai latte and a third biscotti shy of operating at peak performance.

Miller gives his Holmes a number of very Holmesian qualities and puts his own, attractive spin on them. He’s persuasively brilliant. We can see he’s keenly observant, clearly taking in everything Holmes would take in, including all that he’ll decide can be disregarded. He wouldn’t, as Downey’s Holmes does, claim to see “everything.” That would be a waste of effort. But he is seeing.

He’s witty. Every good Holmes has a wicked sense of humor. He’s a quick and crafty liar. He knows when and how to play games with witnesses, suspects, the police, and anyone blundering into his way or tries to interrupt his thinking while he’s pursuing a clue. He’s brusque past the point of rudeness, but he’s not wholly insensitive. It’s just that when he’s focused and at work, his thoughts run away with him and his mouth. He enjoys being a difficult character and even seems to think it’s one of his charms. He talks a lot for someone who’s said to often go days without speaking. In fact, he’s something of a motormouth. But that’s in keeping with Doyle’s Holmes, who, for all he pretends otherwise, enjoys explaining himself and discoursing on his methods and past cases.

But he just doesn’t strike me as sufficiently dangerous.

Or danger-addicted.

He’s not inactive. In fact, he can hardly sit still. And he’s not physically timid. He hasn’t done anything like it in the episodes I’ve watched, but I can imagine him climbing out a window and out onto the ledge of a high-rise apartment to test a theory, just as Cumberbatch’s Holmes does in The Blind Banker. But I see him doing it because he has to and not for the thrill of it as well, as Cumberbatch’s Holmes also does. Miller’s Holmes has strength he can muster when needed and he can be violent and to effect. We see him swing a police baton the way Doyle’s Holmes sometimes does his walking stick, with the confidence that comes from lots of practice and the determination that comes from an intent to cause real damage.

Depressingly, in this case he’s not motivated by practical necessity. He does it for that most clichéd and disingenuous TV detective show tropes---revenge for a crime committed against someone he loves---which writers employ to permit their heroes anything while still making a claim on our sympathy.

He could do more of this. It’s just that he’s not been required to. And that’s what I’m getting at. For all his lapses into lethargies and long periods of silent meditation, Doyle’s Holmes is a man of action, a swashbuckler with a touch of pirate, because his stories require him to be.

Doyle’s Holmes and Watson travel in a fictional world where the violent, the macabre, the bizarre, and the borderline supernatural are routine. While many of the stories are, on the surface, realistic in a 21st Century literary sense and some are even humorous, and the mysteries and crimes in them are somewhat tame---A Scandal in Bohemia,The Blue Carbuncle,The Red-Headed League---most of them at least hint at much darker and dangerous realities. They might start out in a puzzler as seemingly comic and inconsequential as in A Case of Identity but any one of them might turn into The Sign of Four and send Holmes and Watson out into the night and the fog to dodge poison-tipped blow darts and shoot it out with the villains boat to boat during a chase down the river. In short, a lot of what happens in the Guy Ritchie-Robert Downey movies are only exaggerations of what happens in the stories. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are adventures, romantic action-adventures, and Holmes and Watson are action-adventure heroes.

Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t set out to invent the modern detective story and, apparently, quickly lost interest in Holmes, even as Holmes grew in popularity. He even grew to resent him, which is why he killed him off in The Final Problem. The Holmes stories were getting in the way of his writing the kind of adventure tales he preferred to tell and on which he thought his reputation as a writer would be made. Consequently, he routinely used Holmes as an excuse to tell one of those sorts of stories.

So Doyle wasn’t writing about puzzling out mysteries and solving crimes. At the center of most of the Holmes stories is a romantic adventure tale that may include a crime but is more likely building towards one and Holmes and Watson have to work fast to prevent it. They are often coming to the rescue and to do this Holmes usually, but not always, has to puzzle out a mystery. It’s interesting and amusing that Holmes figures out that Doctor Roylott is using a trained swamp adder as a murder weapon, but it’s important that Holmes is there in the nick of time to beat back the snake and save the girl.

For this to matter, we have to care about Helen Stoner as an intended victim and about Roylott as a villain. (By the way, there’s never a doubt that he is a villain. Few of Holmes’ cases are whodunits. Most are howdidtheydoits or howdotheyplantodoits or willtheygetawaywithits.) This means she and he have to matter as characters in a story that matters. It's the same for the heroes, heroines, victims, and villains in the other adventures. They matter because the story matters. The story matters because they matter. You can look at it either way. What it amounts to is that Holmes and Watson are characters in their adventures, quite often supporting characters, arriving like the cavalry as those adventures are reaching their climaxes.

If we weren’t afraid for Helen Stoner, if we weren’t afraid of Doctor Roylott, it wouldn’t strike us as such an impressive feat on Holmes’ part when he figures out what the speckled band is. If we didn’t come quickly to like and admire Irene Adler and develop a rooting interest in her outwitting Holmes, his tricking her into revealing where she hid the photograph would be just that, a neat trick. If we weren’t made to fall half in love with Lady Brackenstall ourselves, it wouldn’t worry us that every bit of evidence Holmes turns up points towards her lying about the circumstances of her husband’s murder.

The stories matter. The characters matter. The mysteries are secondary. And many of the stories are sensationalistic. Doyle's influences include more than Poe’s Dupin and his influence extends beyond Agatha Christie and Rex Stout. Doyle crosses over into high Kipling---The Sign of Four, The Crooked Man---or gives in enthusiastically to the influences of Wilke Collins and his fellow Scot Robert Louis Stevenson---The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Resident Patient, The Creeping Man, The Sussex Vampire. Sometimes---The Dancing Men, The Gloria Scott, Wisteria Lodge, and The Greek Interpreter---he’s paving the way for Jack London and Joseph Conrad.

Of the eight episodes I’ve seen, only two have had plots like those kind of stories. In an episode titled Dirty Laundry, Holmes investigates the murder of a woman who turns out to have been a member of a sleeper cell of Russian spies living as an average American family in the suburbs. I know. Shades of The Americans, right? But Elementary got there first and, besides it’s based on a real and recent news story. And Doyle would have approved of the plot. Holmes finds himself drawn into the world of spies and international intrigue in a number of stories, including The Second Stain, The Red Circle, and The Bruce Partington Plans. But in those adventures, the real stories belong to the people caught up in the intrigue. In Dirty Laundry, what the spies were up to barely matters. Holmes is never in danger of being drawn in to their adventure because there isn’t any adventure. Their story is just the background for the puzzle the writers have given Holmes to solve.

Thursday night’s episode, The Red Team, was about a conspiracy to kill off all the members of a federal counter-terrorist study group that had devised an unstoppable plan for devastating New York. (It’s telling, though, that the title isn’t an allusion to The Red-Headed League.) It came closer to providing Holmes with an actual adventure. The characters almost came to life in their own rights and their story was almost a story. But in the end it was about solving another puzzle and what story it had was a continuation of the revenge trope that excuses the hero for everything.

The show’s writers seem to think we’re interested in Holmes only because we enjoy his being brilliant, But in their struggles to contrive problems for him to solve that require him to be brilliant, they over-complicate the plots, pile on the red herrings, play games with suspects and motives, and, when all else fails, kill off another character in order to give Holmes more clues to chase, making Holmes less of brilliant deductionist than an indefatigable multi-tasker, the opposite of Holmes’ approach in the story which is always to narrow his focus. By the end they’ve tied their stories into so many knots that there is no way for Holmes to be brilliant enough to figure it all out because it can’t be figured out, it can only be described. It’s left to Holmes to explain it to us in a way that makes it seem that he solved the case by the simple trick of reading ahead in the script.

What the writers forget---or failed to observe in their reading of the stories---is that Holmes’ brilliant deductions are often a matter of a single, but simple close observation. He’s noticed something that’s easily overlooked by others---the dirt on a shop assistant’s knees, the dog that did nothing in the night time. And when Holmes explains it, Watson or someone is bound to respond something like, “But that’s so obvious. Why didn’t I think of that?” The suspense isn’t in our wondering if Holmes will solve the problem or how he we will solve it---we know he will and we know when he does our own response will be the same as Watson’s. Part of the fun is chuckling over our own obliviousness.---the suspense is in our worrying that he might not solve it in time.

And the tension comes from the problem’s having been set by a particular person.

Even in the stories where Holmes’ detective work is more central, it’s not a one-man show. Holmes is matching wits with someone at least smart enough to challenge Holmes’ intelligence for a time. There’s a war of wills going on between Holmes and whoever it is, and although sometimes we can’t see his adversaries right away, because they’re as yet unknown or they are offstage and have to be chased down or, at least in one case, dead and, in another case, apparently dead. The point is that an adversary is an active and intelligent character worth Holmes’ time and energy. They don’t need to be and rarely are up to Moriarty’s level, but they have enough in them to present Holmes with a challenge that’s more than solving a puzzle.

Again, this makes them interesting characters in their own rights and gives them stories of their own. In Elementary this has been the case in one case. In the other episodes I’ve seen, the adversary has been only an explanation for the puzzle he or she has supposedly presented Holmes with, as if the writers are always working backwards, starting by saying, “This is a neat mystery we’ve concocted. Now what kind of person would do this?”

So the bad guys don’t matter because they’re just devices to explain the plots, and it’s the same with the victims, who are usually dead from the beginning anyway. And Holmes’ clients don’t matter because…he doesn’t have any clients.

Correction. He has one client. The police.

This Holmes is not a private consulting detective. He’s a full-time consultant for the NYPD and his cases are brought to him by the police, which is a significant change from the usual convention of Doyle’s stories. Many of Holmes’ most intriguing cases are brought to him straight by the victims or intended victims and this means they get to speak for themselves and immediately involve us in their distress.

On Elementary, however, we hear about them second-hand, from the mouths of cops in the voices of and words of cops delivering a report. It’s distancing and it has the effect of reducing them to plot devices in stories that are all about Holmes being brilliant, which, as I’ve pointed out, turns out to be trouble for the writers.

I don’t know why the show’s creators felt they had to give their Holmes this quasi-official position. It’s not true to the stories and it’s not original. Instead of connecting him with Doyle’s Holmes, it makes him just another in a line of TV detectives. Monk, Psych’s Shawn Spencer, Castle are “consultants” to the police too. In fact, Doyle’s Holmes would find this idea offensive. Holmes is routinely insistent that he did not work for the police. He’s a freelancer’s freelancer, a freebooter even, a soldier of fortune (I’m back to the swashbuckling.) and he demands a privateer’s freedom to conduct his business as he sees fit and not as the Law requires. And if that means doing things that are extra-legal or illegal---breaking and entering being one of his favorite tactics---that’s all to the best. More than that, he wants the freedom to choose his own cases. Most of all, though, he wants the freedom to decide for himself whether or not to hand someone over to the Law for punishment.

“…My sister thinks that I am going mad. Sometimes I think that I am myself. And now–and now I am myself a branded thief, without ever having touched the wealth for which I sold my character. God help me! God help me!” He burst into convulsive sobbing, with his face buried in his hands.

There was a long silence, broken only by his heavy breathing, and by the measured tapping of Sherlock Holmes’s finger-tips upon the edge of the table. Then my friend rose and threw open the door.

“Get out!” said he.

“What, sir! Oh, Heaven bless you!”

“No more words. Get out!”

And no more words were needed. There was a rush, a clatter upon the stairs, the bang of a door, and the crisp rattle of running footfalls from the street.

“After all, Watson,” said Holmes, reaching up his hand for his clay pipe, “I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. If Horner were in danger it would be another thing; but this fellow will not appear against him, and the case must collapse. I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward. If you will have the goodness to touch the bell, Doctor, we will begin another investigation, in which, also a bird will be the chief feature.”

So…no adventures or potential adventures, no stories only plots, no real deductions only obviously scripted exposition, no clients, no worthy villains, no real characters besides Holmes and Watson and the police, not even any sense of time and place. Too much can be made of the theatrical trappings of Doyle’s Holmes’ Victorian London, the fog, the gas lamps, the top hats and hansom cabs and cockney voices calling out in the dark. But Holmes lives in a particular place and he knows it inside and out, because he has to in order to do his job, and he knows it in more ways than geographically. He knows its characters and its character. New York City as a particular place doesn’t figure in Elementary hardly at all. It’s a generic city and its crime scenes are generic, a hotel laundry, a bank, a beach, a hospital, a corporate boardroom, an airport hangar, all of which for all we see and hear and for all it matters could be and might as well be in Boston, or Chicago, or Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, or Honolulu, anywhere that’s Big City, USA.

It all adds up to this. Jonny Lee Miller hasn’t convinced me that his Sherlock Holmes is Sherlock Holmes because so far he hasn’t appeared in anything like a real Sherlock Holmes story.

That could change, quickly and easily enough. I hope it does. As I’ve said, Miller’s Holmes has many Holmesian qualities and the swashbuckling side of him might show itself if he’s ever given a real adventure. And he has other traits that weren’t part of Doyle’s Holmes but which has become standard, thanks to that one Sherlock Holmes I didn’t name up top. Nicol Willaimson.

In The Seven Percent Solution (written and directed by Nicholas Meyer in 1976), Williamson made Holmes manic, neurotic, and more than a touch paranoid. He also made him dashing, overtly swashbuckling---the movie’s climax is a swordfight between Holmes and the villain on top of a moving train---and, if not young, youthful.

Of course, Williamson was playing Holmes as a drug addict, so some of these qualities are signs of his being coked out of his head. Brett’s and Cumberbatch’s are recreational users. Miller’s Holmes isn’t using. He’s in recovery. Which brings me to a couple other things that keep me from accepting Miller as the Sherlock Holmes.

He’s young, yes. The youngest Holmes yet, even though Miller is several years older than Cumberbatch. But he’s not young in the sense of being a young man. He’s young in the sense of being boyish. And not just any sort of boy. A little boy lost.

Doyle’s Holmes appears to have no parents. His only family is his brother Mycroft. We don’t know if Miller’s Holmes has a brother but he most definitely has a father. A very stern and demanding one. We haven’t met him yet but his presence is felt in that Holmes’ recovery is being paid for and overseen by his father. So instead of Holmes being in the position of an independent grown-up, he’s essentially a teenager who’s been grounded and who’s always looking for opportunities to sneak out of the house and have some fun.

He even has a babysitter to outwit and avoid.

You’ve probably noticed I haven’t mentioned someone very important to every Holmes. I’ll get to him…I mean her…no, both, him and her in a follow-up post. But for now it’s enough to know that Miller’s Holmes’ Watson is a stand-in for Daddy Holmes.

And if that’s not enough, Holmes’ addiction isn’t due to a habit of self-medication that got out of control.

He was driven to it by heartbreak and grief. Someone near and dear to him was murdered and he can’t forgive himself because he failed to save her.

It’s not much of stretch to play Holmes as psychologically damaged in some way. But I cannot accept as Sherlock Holmes a Sherlock Holmes we’re meant to feel sorry for.

CBS is showing a new episode tonight after the Super Bowl. I’ll be tuning in. There’s still a chance the show will grow on me and that Miller’s Holmes will grow up. I hope so, because, again, he still looks the most like my Sherlock Holmes.

Following up on my post from last week, Elementary! He’s elementarily not my ideal Sherlock Holmes: From time to time, in the original Sherlock Holmes stories, after Holmes has asked (ordered) Watson to join him in an investigation, Watson will make polite noises turning him down, saying he doesn’t want to get in Holmes’ way. Watson is a modest man and well aware that Holmes doesn’t need to have him along. In fact, very often, Holmes doesn’t let him come along or even tell him he’s about to go out on a case without him.

But Holmes is certain to reply something along the lines of Stuff and nonsense! Actually, his most famous reply to one of Watson’s polite refusals is “I am lost without my Boswell.”

This is Holmes’ way of telling Watson that he does need him and, more importantly, wants him along. It’s a statement of affection. He needs and wants Watson along because he’s a good friend.

He needs and wants Watson’s company.

But, as a purely practical matter, let’s ask. Where would Holmes be without his Boswell?

Pretty much in the same fix as Jonny Lee Miller’s Holmes in Elementary. A little lonely, a little less confident, but basically functioning as well as ever as a detective. Mainly, though, not lost but incomplete.

Miller’s Holmes doesn’t need his Boswell but he’d be better off with him…I mean, her.

Sorry. From what I’ve seen, Lucy Liu is not Watson. I don’t know who she is. Apparently, neither do the show’s writers, which means Liu doesn’t know who she is either. She’s trying to figure it out without the writers’ help but she’s struggling. Whoever she is, though, it’s not Watson.

It’s not because they’ve made Watson a woman. That’s not even new. Two TV movies in the 1980s had female Watsons. So does one of my favorite movies from when I was kid, They Might Be Giants. And plenty of TV Holmes avatars and manqués have had female Watsons. Monk and Sharona and then Nathalie. Castle and whoever he’s paired with. The best played Watson to the best Holmes avatar, Vincent D’Onforio’s Bobby Goren of Law and Order: Criminal Intent was Kathryn Erbe as Detective Alex Eames, who is a number of things Doyle’s Watson is and Lucy Liu’s isn’t, among them, independent, capable, and confident enough in her own skills and intelligence that it’s truly persuasive that she’s impressed by Goren and impressed enough to ignore his weirdness and that he’s far from her idea of an ideal partner. She makes us think that if Eames can put up with and even like this guy, then he must be worth putting up with and even liking, a very Watson-esque thing for her to do. All Watsons have the job of helping us appreciate the great gifts and see the humanity of their Holmeses.

So, it’s not the gender change. It’s the career change.

Doyle’s Watson and just about every Watson who’s followed is a former Army surgeon. Liu’s character is a former surgeon.

She’s quit medicine out of guilt at having lost a patient on the operating table.

Her confidence shot, her career over, she’s more or less adrift. But she’s on the lookout for something to do that will give meaning back to her life, and in this her situation is somewhat similar to that of Doyle’s Watson when we first meet him.

I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air–or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had, considerably more freely than I ought.

Then he meets Holmes.

Soon he has moved into 221B Baker Street and is helping Holmes---or at least accompanying Holmes---on an investigation that exhilarates him and brings him back to life. By the end of the novel he’s not practicing medicine again---that doesn’t happen until after the next book, The Sign of Four, and then it’s due to his having met, fallen in love with, and married Mary Morston---but he’s snapped out of his depression and ready to begin work on his second career, the one that will make him and, more importantly, Sherlock Holmes famous.

“I have all the facts in my journal, and the public shall know them.”

Effectively, then, the first person Sherlock Holmes saves with his detective work is Watson, something the BBC’s Sherlock brings to the foreground in its first episode. In Elementary, this appears to be working itself out more slowly and subtly and with an ironic twist. Holmes is saving Watson by drawing her into his work as a detective but she thinks she’s saving him.

But this is where and why the career change works against her achieving real Watson-osity.

Before he returns to medicine, Doyle’s Watson is paying his bills with his army pension. Elementary’s Watson is paying hers by taking work as a “sober companion.”

The central conceit of Elementary is that exactly what Doyle’s Watson worried would happen happened. Holmes’ habit of alleviating his boredom between cases with seven percent solutions of cocaine became a habit. This Holmes is a recovering addict. His move to New York is part of his recovery. He’s left behind bad company and old haunts, presumably like the opium den in The Man With the Twisted Lip, to start his life and his career over, clean and sober. His father---not his brother Mycroft---paid for the move and his rehab, which, as I mentioned in my previous post, I don’t like, because it defines Holmes as a son, a child. But now Daddy Holmes is paying Watson to keep an eye on his kid, see he doesn’t fall into old ways and take up with the wrong friends, drag him to his support group, and nag and scold and lecture and plead with and badger and boss and bully and emotionally blackmail Holmes to keep him from backsliding.

This makes Watson two things, besides annoying, no other Watson is or has been.

A glorified babysitter.

And an employee.

This is a significant and as far as I’m concerned damaging change.

The popular conception has Holmes and Watson joined at the hip, with Watson playing a definite secondary and supporting role. But that notion is Watson’s own doing and a sign of his innate modesty. It’s how he presents himself in the stories. In fact, he has an independent and successful life of his own. And this is key to our appreciating Holmes.

Time to back up a bit and ask the question, Why does Holmes need Watson?

At the most practical level it’s simply that Watson has useful knowledge and experience Holmes lacks. His medical skills and training come in handy particularly at a time when forensic medicine was still a developing field. Doyle’s Holmes and Watson frequently arrive at a crime scene where no competent pathologist is at work. If there’s a local coroner around, it’s usually the case that he’s never seen anything like this before. A 21st Century Holmes, though, shouldn’t face that problem. If the local forensics unit can’t answer a question, there’s always the internet. On the BBC’s Sherlock, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes needs his Doctor Watson because, unlike Jonny Lee Miller on Elementary, he’s not a quasi-official member of the police department and has no authority with the technicians on the scene who therefore aren’t obliged to answer his questions or show him any evidence they’ve collected. On top of that, he’s alienated practically the entire department. He doesn’t like them and he doesn’t respect them, especially not their supervisor Anderson. They don’t work fast enough and they have a bad habit of interrupting Holmes’ thinking by offering their own (wrong) interpretations of the evidence, when they actually find evidence or evidence Holmes recognizes as having real importance.

Liu’s Watson’s medical training occasionally makes her useful at a crime scene, but so far it’s usually been a matter of her saving Holmes the trouble of asking one of the police medical officers at the scene or taking out his smart phone and googling for a fact. And they’ve made him such a walking encyclopedia that often he tells her what she out to be telling him, leaving her nothing to do but confirm he’s correct. At least, though, they haven’t had her sputter a 21st Century American version of “By Jove, Holmes! How the deuce did you know that?”

And it’s damning that Holmes never introduces her as Doctor Watson. It’s always “Joan Watson” or “Miss Watson.” Also, he never calls her his “colleague and associate.” She’s just his associate and he says it in a way that makes it sound like a synonym for assistant. In other incarnations, Doctor Watson’s title opens doors and loosens tongues for Holmes. Being able to introduce his friend and colleague Doctor Watson---or as often happens being introduced himself by Doctor Watson---confers an authority and respectability and an air of professionalism people might not be inclined to grant an amateur private consulting detective, if they can even conceive what such a creature might be. But they’re used to talking freely to doctors and answering their most probing and intimate questions. Elementary’s Holmes doesn’t need help in that way. After all, he’s basically a cop. In real life, he’d be flashing a badge. Watson needs his stamp of legitimacy. She’s allowed on the scene and tolerated because she’s with him.

There’s more to it.

As a doctor and former soldier, Watson has a breadth of experience and acquaintance that’s different from Holmes’. Holmes, who, nevermind the popular conception, has friends besides Watson and his own extensive social circle, but most of those friends and acquaintances belong to London’s underworld, the part of the city he most often visits when he leaves Baker Street. He doesn’t know people who aren’t connected with the criminal side of life. When he meets so-called respectable people of his own class and station it’s usually because somehow or another they’ve been drawn into that world.

But Watson, the doctor, is used to dealing with people in distress not of their own making, and he has learned to treat most everybody the way he treats his patients, with…patience, a virtue Holmes does not practice regularly, and with kindness, tact, and sympathy. He know when and how to employ diplomacy, to show respect towards people Holmes is disinclined to respect, and in short to be polite and charming. Which frees Holmes to be rude and obnoxious or at least less than ordinarily civil. More to the point, it frees Holmes to concentrate on a problem while ignoring the distractions presented by the person with the problem. This, of course, comes most into play when that person with a problem is a woman.

And Watson’s bedside manner, so to speak, is not incidentally a form of information gathering, something else Holmes relies on Watson for. Watson is an extra pair of eyes and ears, and by temperament and training, he’s able to pick up on things Holmes might miss.

After all, he is a trained observer and collector of evidence. Doyle didn’t make Watson a doctor just because he was a doctor himself. Doyle saw his medical schooling as an education in scientific thinking. Watson is every bit the scientist Holmes is. Watson may not be brilliant but he is intelligent and his intelligence is educated and developed by training, experience, and continual practice. This makes him useful to Holmes in another and maybe the most important way.

Watson is someone Holmes can talk to, because Watson can keep up.

Never forget that the reason we can follow Holmes’ line of deduction (if only after the fact) and grasp how he’s solved a case is that Watson has followed it and grasped it and explained it to us.

Holmes can think out loud in front of Watson, try out theories on him, ask him questions he’s asking himself, because, knowing that Watson’s following right along and expecting him to ask intelligent questions back and taking in Watson’s own observations helps him focus and work his way through a problem. Holmes isn’t always polite about acknowledging this. In fact, he can be downright insulting---

“Really, Watson, you excel yourself,” said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. “I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.”

He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval. He now took the stick from my hands and examined it for a few minutes with his naked eyes. Then with an expression of interest he laid down his cigarette, and, carrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with a convex lens.

“Interesting, though elementary,” said he as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee. “There are certainly one or two indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several deductions.”

“Has anything escaped me?” I asked with some self-importance. “I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?”

“I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.

---but he does acknowledge it and he counts on it.

If Watson sometimes seems not to have much to say in reply to Holmes’ monologing, it’s because he’s also smart enough to know his own limits and when to keep his mouth shut so as not to interrupt Holmes when he’s on a tear.

Liu’s Watson is not smart in that way.

She’s not particularly smart in any way Doyle’s Watson and other Watsons are.

I blame this on the writing, not on Liu’s acting. She’s just not given any smartness to play. Going by the stuff the writers have her saying, it’s easy to forget she is---was---a doctor, and a gifted one, according to a former colleague who can’t understand any better than we can why she’s given up her career to play nurse to a rich man’s spoiled brat of son. As far as we can tell, when she practiced she paid less attention to her patients as individuals with feelings than Holmes, any and every Holmes, does to clients. All her knowledge and experience of human nature seems to have been acquired during her time spent in the field of self-help. Her language is the language of self-help and recovery. She says things like:

“That relationship stabilizes him…”

“I just need to re-open those lines of communication…”

And:

“If I feel you’ve compromised his sobriety…”

No wonder Holmes doesn’t talk to her. He talks at her. She’s an excuse for him to soliloquize. Often he seems to be talking to keep her from talking. And why wouldn’t he, if what he’s going to hear out of her is stuff as banal and devoid of independent thought as that?

On top of this, she’s intrusive.

Years go by before Watson learns Holmes has a brother. That’s because he’s too much of an Englishman to pry into a friend’s personal life. Liu’s Watson won’t stop prying. She’s convinced that he needs to dredge up his past in order to achieve the kind of emotional self-awareness necessary to recovery. Other Watsons admonish their Holmes to show some feeling or at least remember that other people have feelings. This Watson is constantly encouraging her Holmes to get in touch with his own.

To be fair, the writers know this is part of her problem. They know they’ve made her a pill. In a clever bit from this past Thursday night’s episode, we see Holmes at his support group relating to his fellow addicts not the latest news from his road to recovery or details from his past struggles with his addictions but the facts of a case he solved back in London, when he was, as it happened, coked out of his skull. Sherlock Holmes fans would recognize the case as an only slightly updated retelling of The Crooked Man. Watson finds this an appalling breach of group etiquette and at the end of the episode, dragging him back to another meeting, she says, scoldingly, “You’re not going to talk about some old case. You’re going to share something real…” depriving us of the real pleasure of hearing him re-tell, as he’s threatening to do, the adventure of The Blue Carbuncle.

Now, here’s where Watson’s not being a doctor and working at a dead-end job that reduces her pretty much to a stand-in for Holmes’ father, whom for the moment the show’s producers are keeping off screen---presumably until they can persuade Christopher Plummer to guest star---makes her less than useful not just to Holmes but to us the audience.

Considered purely as a literary device, Doyle’s Watson does several things for us readers. First, he keeps us out of Holmes’ head. We never get to read Holmes’ thoughts directly, which means we never see him working at being brilliant, we only get the results of his brilliance and thus the mystery and surprise of that brilliance is maintained. Next, Watson as the teller of tales provides us with a point of view that is warm, humane, sympathetic, insightful emotionally as well as intellectually, colorful, and literary. We know what the stories would be like if they were told from Holmes point of view---not stories. They’d be dryly scientific case studies, of interest only to other professionals, like his monographs on tobacco ash, tattoos, 160 separate ciphers, and---Holmes being a world-class violinist as well as a great detective---the polyphonic motets of Lassus. Although Holmes routinely criticizes Watson’s prose style and his taste for the sensational, the romantic, and the dramatic in his accounts of their adventures at the expense, Holmes feels, of the scientific, we sense that Holmes is secretly glad that it’s Watson doing the writing and not himself, recognizing that Watson’s “sensational” stories are better for business and Holmes’ reputation than his own accounts would be and, perhaps, enjoying the way they humanize himself to himself. But, finally and most importantly, seeing that this smart, decent, independent, highly competent and successful doctor is impressed by Sherlock Holmes tells us that it’s right for us to be impressed by him too and, at the same time, seeing that this smart, decent, independent, highly competent and successful doctor is often baffled by what does not baffle Holmes allows us to not to feel bad about being baffled ourselves---in fact, we can enjoy our bafflement just as much as Watson does his.

But Liu’s Watson does not have an independent, self-contained, successful life of her own. In what we see of her life apart from Holmes’, she’s not capable. She’s barely a grown-up.

She’s…

…a self-doubting daughter convinced she’s disappointed her mother.

…a lonely single woman looking for love and failing at the dating game.

…a sulking professional failure, a former doctor who can’t get over her one mistake that proved she’s not perfect.

…a put-upon renter about to be evicted from her rent-controlled apartment until Holmes comes to her rescue.

We’re not impressed that this screw-up is impressed by Sherlock Holmes. We’re astonished that she can stand to be alone in her own company. It’s no wonder that as her term of employment is nearing its end she’s scheming to stay on his sober companion. She’s even lying to him and his father about the progress of his recovery.

This may be part of the producers’ plans for the development of her character. Watson needs to reclaim a life of her own and she may be on track to do it through her admiration and affection for Holmes. He’s inspiring her. But it’s not promising that she doesn’t seem inspired to get back into medicine. She’s not contemplating opening her own clinic somewhere. What she seems attracted to is the idea of working with Holmes as a partner in crime-solving. I suppose the producers think that in this way she’ll become his equal. But she can’t be his equal unless he’s not really Sherlock Holmes. By definition, Holmes has no equal as a detective. But even if she does learn his methods and how to apply them, she will still have no real life of her own apart from his. At best all she’ll be is a junior detective.

Doyle’s Watson and every real Watson who’s followed is not Holmes’ equal as a detective, but he’s his equal in other ways and even his superior in some. He’s not Holmes’ partner in crime-solving because the world’s greatest detective does not need a partner, not even a junior partner. Watson is Holmes’ partner in adventuring.

This brings me back to my point in my previous Holmes post. The reason Jonny Lee Miller hasn’t convinced me his Sherlock Holmes is the Sherlock Holmes is that so far he hasn’t shown enough of that side of Holmes, the adventurous, swashbuckling, freebooting, violent and dangerous side. Almost all original stories centered around wild and violent and romantic adventures that had swept up Holmes’ clients and other characters and there was always the chance that if they weren’t careful or if their investigation went awry Holmes and Watson would be caught up in the wildness and the violence themselves. This happens in a number of the stories and, Watson tells us, has happened on cases he hasn’t written up yet and, apparently even more frequently, on cases Holmes tackles alone.

Where would Holmes be without his Boswell? From what we can tell, working more often in secret as a late Victorian combination of James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Batman.

So Holmes has to be prepared to turn into an action-adventure hero at any moment, and part of his preparation is to call on Watson. This is a very real way Holmes needs Watson. He depends on him to have his back in a fight.

Don’t forget, throughout most of the stories both Watson and Holmes are still young men.

Watson is brave, dogged, quick-witted, keen-eyed---he may not observe according to Holmes’ lights, but he can see what’s coming at them---and unflinching. When Holmes suggests he bring his trusty service revolver along on a case, it’s not because Watson owns a gun. It’s because he’s good with one.

Like Holmes, Watson, the war hero, is a dangerous and potentially violent man.

This is one of the reasons I get such a kick out of Jude Law’s Watson in the Guy Ritchie-Robert Downey Sherlock Holmes movies. Downey’s Holmes is an exaggeration of Doyle’s Holmes. But Law’s Watson could be dropped as is into a more traditional adaptation---say one starring Jonny Lee Miller---and Law would hardly have to change anything except to shave closer.

The last three episodes of Elementary---The Red Team,The Deductionist, and A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs---have allowed Miller to show a more dangerous side to his Holmes. He’s not as much of swashbuckler as he is a thug, more Daniel Craig as opposed to Pierce Brosnan in his inner Bondness. But he’s capable of inflicting pain and damage on the bad guys and willing to put himself in danger, not for danger’s sake but out of sheer ruthlessness and a desire to punish the villain.

Liu’s Watson, however, has not shown any sign she’d be useful in a fight, not even to call 911. She’d drop her cell or discover she’s forgotten to charge it. In A Giant Gun, Filled With Drugs she does manage to help out by knocking out the bad guy while his back is turned by smashing a plaster bust of Napoleon over his head, reaching for the nearest literary allusion because no flower vase is handy. And this takes so much out of her that right after she collapses into bed and sleeps for six hours. So she’s not exactly the kind of partner in adventure Holmes can depend on to have his back.

She’s not dependable in any way, in fact, except in the way she keeps offering to be and urging him to take advantage of, as a friend Holmes can open up to, and we can only hope he never takes her up on the offer.

Ok. It’s network television. The target audience isn’t obsessive Holmes fans like me. It’s fans of TV detective shows looking for something fun to cap off their Thursday nights. If you miss Monk, miss House, and can’t get enough of Castle and The Mentalist, Elementary will fit the bill. And things might change. In fact, as I’ve said, there are signs they are changing. We don’t need to find out that Liu’s Watson has her own Army issued .45 in her sock drawer or that she has hidden martial arts skills that like Kane she’s Zen enough to keep in check until pushed too far. I really hope she doesn’t. I would love it if the writers could find ways to show that she is brave, stalwart, capable, and in her own way dangerous than just by having her turn out to have been one of Charlie’s Angels.

_______________________

Nicol Williamson was the first Sherlock Holmes who looked and acted like my ideal Sherlock Holmes, and his Watson, Robert Duvall, was the first Watson who was at all close to my ideal Watson. David Burke and Edward Hardwicke were both excellent Watsons but they were something of a step back in being more decidedly middle-aged. An unsung but fine and youthful Watson was Ian Hart who played Watson to two different fine and youthful Sherlock Holmeses, Robert Foxburgh and Rupert Everett. But I was thrilled when I saw Jude Law in the part. That, I said, is my Watson, well, except for the homo-erotic sexual panic. And he’d still be my all time favorite Watson, but now Martin Freeman has come along.

Freeman’s Watson, who besides having the advantage of working with what may be the best Sherlock Holmes ever, is Watson through and through, dependable in every way every Holmes needs his Watson to be, including having his back in fight. Despite looking like a hobbit, Freeman’s Watson is every bit as dangerous as Law’s. This has been dealt with comically---

But it’s demonstrated to ruthless effect in the very first episode when Watson takes aim and shoots a murderer in the back and then coolly shrugs it off without remorse or regret.

The first person Cumberbatch’s Holmes saves is Watson. But ever since they’ve pretty much kept it even.

Last night, to celebrate her triumphant visit to our class, Steve Kuusisto and I took the Self-Styled Siren herself, Farran Smith Nehme, out for dinner at an excellent Thai restaurant in Armory Square called Lemon Grass that I was surprised was still there after all the time that had passed since the last time I’d eaten there, which must have been at least a dozen years ago now. I’ve been told by people who work in the restaurant biz that restaurants, even excellent restaurants, have an average life of five years. Of course, you’re reaching that average by averaging all the places that close in a month with those that have been in business since 1908. Here’s hoping Lemon Grass is one of those places destined to be in business a hundred years from now. But here’s the thing.

Even though I know I ate at Lemon Grass once upon a time I don’t have a tangible memory of it. I recall it. That is, I can call up images from that night. The décor was different, I think. Lighter tones, a more minimalist feel. I think there were silvery accents in the windows. I’d expect my memory to be fuzzy after twelve years. But I’d also have expected that being back would have jogged a few things loose in my head. Who was with us, for instance. Who was with me. I’m just assuming the blonde was there because I’m not an adventurous diner-out and wouldn’t have gone unless she dragged me. But was she? Was that the case, she’d talked me into going despite my desire to make due with a pizza somewhere? Were we with friends? Were we there before or after a movie? What was the movie? Did I enjoy the meal? What day of the week was it? What time of year? What was the weather? I can’t tell you.

Like I said. Expected.

And, again, like I said, I know I ate there once and only the one time. The question is, how do I know this without actually remembering it?

And this was part of a larger experience. I drove us there from the university without having to think about what route to take. And when we entered the neighborhood and Steve, who has lived in Syracuse for two years now said I should turn right at the next corner, I said, again without thinking, nope, it’s a block farther on and to the left. Armory Square is a part of town I visited often. Although I know I only ate at Lemon Grass once, there were several other restaurants I know we went to regularly. It’s also where the science museum is and when the boys were little we practically lived there.

I know all this. I knew it all last night. But I didn’t remember any of it. I recalled it. It was a robot’s memory, an accessing of files disengaged from feelings and emotional associations, with no cross-referencing.

This is how it’s been everywhere I’ve gone in Syracuse since I started going back up there to teach in January. And I think this is weird because, for those of you who don’t know, we called Syracuse home for all of the last decade of the 20th Century and the first thirty-third of the 21st. You’d think the place would have left an impression. And it did. I have many detailed and evocative memories of our life there.

It’s just that none of them travel with me back up there.

I drive down streets I know I drove down regularly back then, pass through neighborhoods I used to know---and still seem to know, that is I can find my through them without getting lost---like the back of my hand, eat at places I know I ate at any number of times, shop at stores that took a lot of my money over the course of twelve years, and I recall it all and remember none of it.

This has even happened when I’ve visited our old friends Chris the Cop and his wife and their no longer little daughters at the house I helped them move into way back when. No, I don’t mean I don’t remember Mr and Mrs the Cop and the girls the Cop. I have many fond memories of good times together, movies seen, dinners eaten (Were they with us at Lemon Grass?), a wedding attended, two babies born. But those memories aren’t attached to this house and so far haven’t been re-triggered the times I’ve stopped in and stayed over since January. For all the house evokes, my first visit back might as well have been my first visit ever.

What I’m getting at is that my memories of Syracuse aren’t proving to be attached to Syracuse.

This isn’t important or sense-of-self-shakingly disturbing. It just makes me curious about how my mind and my memory work.

Summer before last, I was down in the city for a lecture by Alan Alda at the Paley Center for Media. (Hat tip M.A. Peel.) Alda has lately made it something of a mission to help teach scientists how to talk about science in ways that help the general lay public better understand science and what scientists are up to, in effect, to help teach the scientists to be better teachers. One of the things he touched on was how to present ideas so that the audience not only understands them but remembers them, which required him to talk a little bit about how memory works.

People tend to have the most vivid memories of events that have a strong emotion attached, Alda said, and he related a story a neuroscientist had told him. It was probably a just-so story the neuroscientist liked to use to emphasize a point, but it went like this:

In pre-literary cultures, when people were having a public event that they wanted remembered, that is, they wanted to makes sure that the importance of the event and whatever it said about their culture, customs, laws, morality, history, and collective wisdom was passed down to their unborn grandchildren, they would make sure the event was witnessed by an especially attentive seven year old boy. And when the event was over, they would take that little boy, carry him down to the river, and throw him in.

Here Alda paused for one of his trademark mischievous grins.

“Of course, they fished him out,” he said. “But he never forgot that day.”

Terror isn’t a preferred mnemonic device, but you get the point. We’re more likely to remember something if we were feeling strongly at the moment our future memories of it are embedded.

Which would imply I didn’t feel anything or much of anything while I was in Syracuse.

That’s not at all true though.

I have memories of times in Syracuse that can make me cry, laugh out loud, scream with rage, beat my head against a wall, or fill me with a deep and abiding sense of satisfaction, solace, contentment, or peace. But, again, like I said, those feelings don’t travel with me to Syracuse. They stay here at home because, the way it works, they are attached to my life here.

It’s been almost exactly a decade since we moved from there to here, but that ten year absence doesn’t present itself as a gap in time during which it was natural for memories to fade. It’s a bend in the flow of my life’s stream. The river jumped course in November 2003 and it’s carried along with it (away from Syracuse and down to here) all my most vivid memories because they stayed in the canoe I’ve been paddling all along.

There are other places I used to live or spend great deals of time where, when I go back, I can’t take a step without being overwhelmed with memories and their attendant strong feelings, Boston, Cape Cod, New York City, the areas around the Old Mannion and Blonde Family homesteads. Part of this is due to my having loved and my still loving those places as places. I have strong feelings about the landscapes, the streetscapes, the seascapes, many of the buildings and houses, the weather, the ways people come and go which don’t change even as the people themselves change because they are directed by those landscapes, streetscapes, seascapes, and the weather and those strong feelings are due to the fact that the scenery and the weather and the movement of the people are beautiful and dramatic and bursting with life.

There are pretty spots in and around Syracuse and you can have some truly nice days in the summer and early fall, but it’s really not a handsome city or a particularly vital one and the weather is terrible.

It’s a hard place to develop any affection for as a place, never mind love.

But the important difference, the difference I’m feeling, is that when I go back to other places it’s not that I’m there on a visit. I’m there because the course of my life in the present has carried me there. It’s not so much that they are places I love but that going to any one of them isn’t a matter of going some place else. Here and there are all the same place. The river of my life flows through them still.

I think I need to put this another way.

My time Syracuse ended ten years ago, but my life in Syracuse didn’t end then, it continued here. My life there wasn’t defined by the place but by my experiences in the place and those experiences were tied to other experiences before we lived there and continued after we left.

This would explain something. Puttering about town doesn’t trigger emotion-filled memories of past putterings about town. But walking into the classroom every Tuesday triggers emotion-filled memories of…Indiana.

Being back in the classroom as an old man flashes me back to my first days in front of a classroom as young man. My students now bring back vivid images of my students then. I listen to myself talk in class and I can hear myself talking then. I hobble in leaning on my cane and I get the urge to do something I did from time to time back then, make a standing leap onto the table to make a point. (I was doing that before Robin Williams did it in Dead Poet’s Society, by the way.) I take this to show that my return to Syracuse is going to be defined in my memories by my experiences teaching and so those memories will connect back to my previous experiences in Syracuse as a teacher which didn’t occur in Syracuse but well out of town and I’d bet if I ever re-visit those schools I will be floored by the rush of remembered emotions.

What’s more, I suspect that the reason I haven’t been floored by any such rush while puttering about town is that so far I haven’t gone places connected with the dominant experience of my time there which is part of the dominant experience of my time here, our raising of our sons.

And I’ve held something back. I have been floored like that, once---once so far---when I went to Wegman’s, the supermarket where we shopped regularly, for the first time since 2003.

Not the whole place. One aisle. The bakery aisle.

The rest of the store I recalled the way I recalled the route to Lemon Grass. I found my way around without even thinking about it, recognizing everything without feeling anything much about it. And then I meandered into the bakery aisle and past the counter where we ordered and picked up what must have amounted to over forty birthday cakes by the time we left town and I came close to weeping.

And, given that experience, you can probably guess that there’s one neighborhood in Syracuse I have been deliberately and carefully avoiding because I’m terrified I will drown in the flood of memories.

Started myself off on a kick with my Pacino post yesterday, I think. I’m in the mood to watch all those great movies from the first half 70s starring Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and Gene Hackman. Began last night with The Conversation, since it’s streaming on Netflix.

It’s good. It’s too good. Too good at being itself. It’s relentlessly what it is. No let up, no relief, no breaks in the tension or mood. If you ever want to make the case that perfection is actually the enemy of great art, The Conversation can be exhibit A. Hackman is too good too. John Cazale isn’t. He’s just right.

Afterwards, I looked up some things about the making of the film and on imdb found that director Francis Ford Coppola and Hackman set out to make Hackman’s character Harry Caul look like a man who wears his entire narrow, gray, and depthless emotional life on the outside, hence the unhip, civil engineer’s glasses, the mustache that says nothing about Harry except that he has a mustache, and the odd, unnecessary transparent raincoat. Part of achieving this “look” was having Hackman wear suits ten years out of date.

When’s ten years out of date from the time frame of the movie?

1964.

Mad Men era.

I’m sure it read differently in 1974, but from the perspective of post 1970s audiences who’ve long since accepted the idea that everything hip and groovy about that kidney stone of a decade was really the exact opposite, Harry doesn’t look like the “nudnik” Coppola and Hackman set out to make him. Harry’s dressed in the uniform of an adult professional as opposed to dressed up in the costume of the determinedly I may be a banker or a Presidential aide but I’m still a member of the counterculture at heart Rock Hudson as McMillan wannabes.

He’s no Don Draper, but, when he’s ditched the raincoat, next to the other men around him---except for Cazale and Harrison Ford, who three years before Han Solo is seen here giving off a vaguely gay vibe as an unctuous, cookie-baking smoothie of an executive’s assistant---with their overwide ties and earth tones and hot-combed hair and bushy porn star mustaches, Harry looks not stylish but at least put-together, grown-up, and in a way cool.

In the space of four years Pacino did The Godfather, Scarecrow, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Godfather II.No wonder we thought he was God’s gift.But then he followed up with Bobby Deerfield, And Justice For All, Cruising, Author! Author!, Scarface (a cult classic, I know, but, come on, it's ridiculous), Revolution, Sea of Love, Dick Tracy (although Pacino's actually very funny), The Godfather III, and Frankie and Johnny.The question is, when did his career right itself? With Scent of a Woman, Carlito’s Way, or Heat?Or wasn’t it until Donnie Brasco? Or did it take all four plus The Insider? (Ignoring The Devil’s Advocate. I liked City Hall, but I wouldn’t count it as a career saver.)

In about the same period as Pacino was getting his career started with those five great performances, Gene Hackman did, among other films, The French Connection, Prime Cut, The Poseidon Adventure, Scarecrow, The Conversation, Zandy’s Bride, Young Frankenstein, and Night Moves, while Jack Nicolson turned out Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Last Detail, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Robert De Niro starred in Bang the Drum Slowly, Mean Streets, The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, The Last Tycoon, and The Deer Hunter.

There are few things as exciting for classic car aficionados than the “barn find.” A coveted car is placed in storage or forgotten for decades, and when the property changes hands or the car’s hiding place is disturbed- these long-lost vehicles return to the classic car world. It is a special occasion to find one of these lost classics- but nearly 500? That’s a vintage car gold mine.

According to the New York Times, the collection belongs to Ray Lambrecht of Pierce, Nebraska. He was a Chevy dealer for five decades, and retired in 1996. His dealership didn’t sell any trade-ins and bought its inventory outright. He kept any unsold inventory and stored it, along with any cars he thought would have long-term value. The collection started to grow, and became his retirement plan.

<snip>

The collection includes a 1958 Chevy Pickup with 1.3 miles, a ’64 Impala with 4 miles, and a ’78 Corvette Indy Pace Car Edition with only 4 miles on the odometer. As the years went on the collection grew out of the confines of parking lots and warehouses where they were previously stored. These cars are being auctioned off now that the land they were stored on is being developed.

I’m not looking forward to the day when the young Mannion men leave the farm, but I am looking forward to something the blonde and I will be able to enjoy when they do---long fall weekends on Cape Cod when the shore birds on are on the move:

A variety of factors work to make this time of year exceptional. The first is that bird populations of all species are at their highest point of the year because of all the young birds produced during the breeding season. They are making their first migration. Second is the rapidly decreasing photoperiod (shortening time of daylight), accompanied by decreasing temperatures (especially inland), which causes a decreasing food supply as plants and their attendant insects begin to shut down for the approaching winter. This all combines to trigger the instinctual, inherited migratory urge that so many of our North American breeding birds have evolved. This "perfect storm" of factors combines to make this far and away best time of the year to see many birds of many species.

All migratory birds are on the move in mid-September. Each and every day holds promise, excitement and a bit of mystery as one heads out to scan a favorite spot. There is no way to know what one is going to see or hear and the only way to find out is to go out and do it. A "bad" morning birding in September (does not exist) is better than almost anything except a great morning birding in October. Enough already about how great the birding is on the Cape and Islands at this season-if you don't believe it just go try it and see for yourself.

The unexpected is expected, almost commonplace, on the Cape and Islands in September. It continues to be a good year for seeing buff-breasted sandpipers and Baird's sandpipers all over the northeast. These long-distance migrants are not seen many years, and when they are, it is in a very brief window that runs from late August thru mid-September. The American golden plover, another scarce long -distance wader, has been widely reported from farm fields on Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard and in southeastern Massachusetts as well as from a few beaches. These lovely plovers are on their way to South American wintering grounds and are always a treat to see.

That’s a buff-breasted sandpiper in the photo, by the way. Laux reports it’s a good time to see these birds, which implies they’re plentiful, but according to my National Geographic Society Water, Prey, and Game Birds of North America, once upon a time, “Market gunners nearly wipe out the species during its migrations, for the dense flocks would return again and again to its wounded members.” I guess they’ve bounced back since whenever those market gunners did their dirty work.

Cate Blanchett as not Blanche DuBois with Bobby Cannavale as not Stanley Kowalski in Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen’s ironic riff on A Streetcar Named Desire.

I promised friends I wouldn’t say anything about Blue Jasmine until they’d had a chance to see it. Easy promise to keep since I don’t have much to say about it.

Really, Lance? You don’t have much to say about a movie? A Woody Allen movie? Go ahead, pull the other one.

Ok, a few things. Just notes, really, that I don’t think will spoil anything for my friends or any of you who haven’t seen it yet.

You know how people will say, “I’d pay to see [insert name of great actor here] read the phone book”? Blue Jasmine isn’t a Cate Blanchett reads the phone book movie, but the movie exemplifies the spirit behind the saying. You’re paying to see a great actress act. Blue Jasmine could be adapted for the stage as a one-woman show. The other characters are there to push the button that starts Jasmine on what amounts to another soliloquy.

This marks a big difference between Blue Jasmine and the play Allen unabashedly riffs on throughout, A Streetcar Named Desire. In Streetcar, Blanche DuBois’ arrival disrupts a community that exists apart from her and is important to itself despite her. It’s a very small, tawdry community and probably needs disrupting but the fact is its members don’t need Blanche to be themselves. In Blue Jasmine, the little community Jasmine invades, her sister’s family and small circle of friends, pretty much defines itself around Jasmine. It’s nearly impossible to imagine most of the other characters existing when Jasmine isn’t there. Jasmine faces no Stanley who insists she respond to the fact of another person with needs and interests and desires of his own to rival and even supersede hers. Bobby Cannavale’s Chili, Jasmine’s sister’s boyfriend, is in fact in danger of being erased by Jasmine and he feels it. His reaction is a very un-Stanley-esque cringing and whining.

But then Allen isn’t doing a rewrite of Tennesee Williams. Blue Jasmine isn’t to Streetcar what Clueless is to Jane Austen’s Emma or Kurosawa’s Ran to King Lear. Allen uses the play to provide structure and the semblance of a plot. It’s also a source of ironic humor. It’s funny to compare scenes. Oh, that’s like when… I see, this is that scene… Ah, he’s supposed to be…

The inherent compare and contrast also provides a lesson in the difference between the tragic and the merely pathetic. Like any tragedy, Streetcar could have been a comedy. Blue Jasmine is a comedy with the jokes removed.

I could probably do a post making the case that Cheers during the Diane years was a through the looking glass comedy version of Streetcar.

You can feel where the jokes would have been in Jasmine and might find yourself, like I did, chuckling in those spots as if the jokes were actually there.

The real significant influence on Blue Jasmine isn’t Williams, it’s John Cassavetes. Especially Faces and A Woman Under the Influence. Allen has been a longtime student of Cassavetes. He even made what’s essentially a John Cassavetes’ film, Another Woman, which starred Cassavetes’ wife and leading lady, Gena Rowlands. There’s a much more improvisational feel to the dialog in Blue Jasmine than in most other Allen films.

As she enters her forties, Cate Blanchett is beginning to look like Gena Rowlands.

Or maybe that’s a deliberate effect of lighting, makeup, and camera angles.

I can imagine Ben Gazzara as Chili. Peter Falk in the parts played by Max Casella, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Andrew Dice Clay. Cassavetes as the Alec Baldwin character. Seymour Cassel could have had either of the parts played by Louis C.K and Peter Sarsgaard.

Sarsgaard looks exactly like Kelsey Grammar did on Cheers.

Alec Baldwin should only work with Woody Allen and Tina Fey. He was the best thing in To Rome With Love. It’s hard to remember, and possibly not worth remembering, that he was also the best part of Allen’s Alice. He’s not the best part of Blue Jasmine, but he is the best part that isn’t Cate Blanchett.

The only thoroughly likeable character in Blue Jasmine is actually completely despicable. I don’t know if that’s thematic or Allen presenting us with one of life’s little ironies. All the way through I found myself identifying with the worst in every character. Needless to say, I left the theater feeling less than happy with myself or the world. This might have been me, but I think it was more that all these characters were most vital when they were displaying their weaknesses and flaws. It wasn’t a matter of their vices being more attractive than their virtues. It’s that their virtues were watery and ineffective. Blue Jasmine is about a collection of people who just can’t help themselves. Which, when you get down to it, is what makes them pathetic and not tragic.

_____________________

Welcome to everybody coming over from Movie City News. If you like what goes on around and you'd like to help keep things chuggling merrily along in Mannionville and you can swing it, please consider making a donation. It'd be much appreciated.

We live in a purple patch of this very blue state. Actually, it’s more of a red violet than grape and there are patches of or patch that are as crimson as the Confederate battle flag. Which is why this wasn’t exactly a surprise.

This evening, on our way to pick up Oliver from work, Ken and I found ourselves following a black Humvee flying the Stars and Bars. Not a small handkerchief-sized replica attached to its antenna. One the size of the flags that went up Cemetery Ridge waving from a pole attached to the driver’s side door panel. And on the rear window, professionally lettered in white paint, was the Second Amendment, the absolutist’s preferred abridgement, at any rate: “The right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged”.

Ken focused on the flag.

“He’d better be careful not to drive into certain ethnic neighborhoods,” he said.

I was going to say my bet was the driver’s a coward and knows better than to fly his colors anywhere but where he feels he is offending only granola-eating liberals like us. But then I remembered I once had a student who was a Skinhead and he wrote his first essay on how he and his friends had spent a Saturday night driving around the black sections of Muncie, Indiana looking for a fight. Some of these nuts are in fact nuts.

What I said instead was, “I’d like to see him drive into downtown Newburgh. He’d probably meet lots of people there who’d be happy to show him how much they agree with him on the Second Amendment."

It’s hard to understand what Right Wingers think because they don’t think. They feel. They're proud of this. The closest they come to a coherent thought is like the slowly dissolving memory of a dream after it’s woken you up and all you can really remember is the dread and terror it caused. Basically, their politics are driven by nightmares. So I can’t tell exactly what they’re afraid Obamacare will specifically do to take away their liberty and bring down the nation. Probably something to do with ending their Medicare and giving all their money to them. But guns and gay marriage might be involved. Maybe abortion too. It’s no wonder they’re confused, though. Everything they’ve been told about Obamacare by the corporate stooges who run the Republican Party and their Right Wing media shills has been a lie. And among the biggest lies they’ve been told are that Obamacare would be the President’s “Waterloo” and that it can be repealed, defunded, or otherwise made to disappear to the President’s humiliation.

The moment the Affordable Health Care Act became the law of the land, Mitch McConnell and his fellow corporate water carriers knew they had only two chances to undo it. The Supreme Court could declare it or some of its key provisions unconstitutional. The GOP would take back the White House and the Senate in 2012.

The Right Winger faithful should have been able to figure out the problem here. In order to pass a law---or unpass one---you need the votes of the majority in both Houses of Congress. Even if you get those, you need the President to sign the law into law. If that doesn’t happen, if it gets vetoed, you need a two-thirds majority in both Houses to over-ride the veto. This is Schoolhouse Rock stuff. But I guess the aging baby boomers who make up the majority of the Right Wing base these days are too old to have watched and remembering back to their high school civics class is too taxing for their age-withered brains.

Very simply, the votes were never there. Not on the Supreme Court bench. Not in Congress. Not in the White House where all it takes is a majority of one. Not in the country at large.

But so what? As long as the lie kept the yahoos riled up and running to the polls to vote for the GOP, the lies were good and useful.

Here’s the thing.

For almost two generations, the corporatists and their flunkeys in the Republican Party leadership have been stoking the yahoos’ angers and fears and resentments, keeping them riled up and running to the polls, secure in their belief they could keep the yahoos in line, taking their money, winning office with their votes, and enjoying the power and privilege the money and the votes gave them, without the yahoos ever catching on to the fact that they were being gulled and used.

The corporatists forgot something. This is still a democracy. Power belongs to the side with the most votes. And slowly but surely the yahoos began to realize they had the votes.

They began electing themselves to office from town and school boards on up to the United States Senate. They voted themselves control of local Republican Party Committees.

The corporatists thought of the yahoos the way they think of everybody who isn’t rich, as employees.

The yahoos thought of themselves as citizens.

There aren’t enough yahoos to take control of the country and there are never going to be, simply because most of them are old and their grandchildren aren’t listening to them.

But there’s enough of them to take over the Republican Party.

And they’ve pretty much done it.

In 2012, the GOP’s best chance for winning the White House was to run a relatively moderate technocrat. They had one all set to go. But he couldn’t get nominated as a relatively moderate technocrat. He could only get nominated by turning himself into the political griffin Mitt Romney turned himself into, a pathetic monster with the wings and head of a Right Wing eagle and the spineless torso of a well-tailored owner of a chain of car dealerships.

Now Mitch McConnell faces a serious challenge from a Right Winger representing the angry yahoos who believed him when he said Obamacare would be the President’s Waterloo and now blame him for not being the Duke of Wellington.

And John Boehner begs for help from Democrats to save his speakership.

Welcome to everybody coming over from Crooks & Liars. If you like what goes on around and you'd like to help keep things chuggling merrily along in Mannionville and you can swing it, please consider making a donation. It'd be much appreciated.